Molly Goldberg, Quintessential Jewish Mother: Through Genetics or Culture?

Nadene Goldfoot                                             

 Jewish mothers have a special reputation  They are thought to be of a strong personality, leaders in their family, with special connections to their children, you know, the typical Yiddisha Mama you don't dare cross.  They solve all problems and you, if their children, want to do your best for them.  They are remembered in the TV series, Molly Goldberg and in the song, My Yiddisha Mama, a song that makes you cry, you miss her guidance so much.  The Tanakh (Old Testament) introduced us to them through such strong women  as Deborah, Ruth, Naomi, Rachel, Rebecca,  and  Esther. 

Writing by pencil 

Molly Goldberg was a movie in the 50s;   Molly Goldberg, the bighearted matriarch of her fictitious Bronx family who moved to Connecticut as a symbol of Jewish-American upward mobility, was actually played by Gertrude Berg that started as a radio show.  It was Tillie Edelstein, alias Gertrude Berg, who wrote the script.  After the sugar factory where her husband worked burned down, she developed a semi-autobiographical skit, portraying a Jewish family in a Bronx tenement, into a radio show. Though the household had a typewriter, Berg wrote her script by hand, taking the pages this way to a long-awaited appointment at NBC. When the executive she was meeting with protested that he could not read what Berg had written, she read the script aloud to him. Her performance not only sold the idea for the radio program but also got Berg the job as the lead actress on the program she had written. Berg continued to write the show's scripts by hand in pencil for as long as the program was on the air.  This is the perfect example of the Jewish mother, a strong woman who saves the family by her wit and her will. 

                                                            

Youtube's rendition of My Yiddishe Mama, in Yiddish,  by Regine Zylberberg is amazing; like the original with pictures I've never seen before from the Holocaust of women.  The song, in English and Yiddish, sadder in the original Yiddish than in the English translation, is where the mother implicitly symbolizes a sense of nostalgia for the "old world", as well as guilt for having left it behind in assimilating into American society. It is a song written by Jack Yellen (words and music) and Lew Pollack (music), first recorded by Willie Howard, and was made famous in Vaudeville by Belle Baker and by Sophie Tucker, and later by the Barry Sisters. Sophie Tucker began singing "My Yiddishe Momme" in 1925, after the death of her own mother.    Sophie Tucker made 'Mama' a top 5 U.S. hit in 1928, English on one side and Yiddish on the B-side. Leo Fuld combined both in one track and made it a hit in the rest of the world." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msXoInq243c

Now we find through DNA studies that Ashkenazi mt haplotype found in men and women but carried only by the woman originated from 4 women; all from Europe. "Mt-DNA of Ashkenazi Jews. ... A 2006 study by Behar et al., based on high-resolution analysis of Haplogroup K (mtDNA), suggested that about 40% of the current Ashkenazi population is descended matrilineally from just four women, or "founder lineages", likely of mixed European and Middle Eastern origin."  K seems to be the most common DNA of my Jewish matches found on ftdna  and 23&Me, though I am not.  

"A 2013 study, based on a much larger sample base, drew differing conclusions, namely, that the Mt-DNA of Ashkenazi Jews originated among southern European women, where Diaspora communities had been established centuries before the fall of the Second Temple in 70 CE.   A 2014 study by Fernandez et al. found that Ashkenazi Jews display a frequency of haplogroup K which suggests an ancient Near Eastern origin, stating that this observation clearly contradicts the results of the study led by Richards which suggested a predominantly European origin for the Ashkenazi community's maternal lines. However, the authors of the 2014 study also state that definitively answering the question of whether this group was of Jewish origin rather than the result of a Neolithic migration to Europe would require the genotyping of the complete mtDNA in ancient Near Eastern populations.

                                                             

                   Old Term for Middle East

           Today's Middle East

3 of those women carried the K haplotype and 1 carried the HV1 in one study.  The HV1's  Possible place of origin is  West Asia (Near East or Caucasus). 

Typing/HVS-I results have also indicated several from Northwest Africa, matching European HVS-I types2, likely the result of gene flow from Mediterranean Europe. K

 So, for all intents and purposes, Middle East and Near East refer to the same region when used today. ... The Near East included the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans, while the Middle East ranged between the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia—quite a small region compared with what we consider to be the Middle East today.  I for one Ashkenazi thought we came right from ancient Israel's southern tribe, Judah-where the population became us Jewish people.  I have concluded that we certainly did.  Here's how.

When Judah was destroyed by the Romans in 70 CE, the population had gone through the worst tragedy one can imagine; starvation to the extreme; then attacks and capture.  Some smart people saw what was coming and had left before the attack, but not many.  Others were not living in Jerusalem but other cities unimportant to the Romans.  Those that were captured were taken to Rome and used in the circuses or sold as slaves.  Eventually through the years, Jews were freed who lived through this horror and lived in Italy.  From there they migrated to Germany where they became Ashkenazis and spoke Yiddish, a blend of Hebrew and German.  After many years as Christianity emerged and did not accept Jews as equals, Jews emigrated towards eastern Europe where they found refuge and could use their skills developed in trading, for that was developing in many countries on a country to country level.                                                        

                  The original traveling salesmen, wholesale and retail on the Silk Road

Men often went to a new area alone into a new area to first trade, and left their women in an established and safe place.  If young and single, they would marry women in a new area.  Our ancestral mothers were married to Jewish men, and the children were Jewish by marriage.  A boy was circumcised  at 8 days which is part of the Jewish religion and culture.  The boy is also expected to be bar mitzvahed at age 13, then a member of the Jewish men with responsibilities.   So, about 40% of Jewish women from the first 4 mothers were not directly from Judah, their father was.  We carry a long enough line of segments of DNA from Jewish fathers to be an endogamous people.  In fact, many Jews have found that they have married their 4th or 5th cousins and wasn't aware of any previous family connections. An example was Ruth, a Moabite who was not Jewish but who married a Jewish man.                                                     

 That's because Jews have been living together with the same group of people for so long in so many different circumstances through the ages.  At first the rule was that children were Jewish through their father, but later they caught on and deemed a child Jewish if they had a Jewish mother. "Although the Hebrew Bible defines Jewish identity in patrilineal terms (determined by the identity of the father) the Mishnah states that the offspring of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father is recognized as a Jew, while the offspring of a non-Jewish mother and a Jewish father is considered a non-Jew. This talmudic position became normative in Jewish law."  

Today it just depends on whether your are orthodox, conservative or reformed.  Reformed Jews would accept having a Jewish father would make the child Jewish.  Being children spend more time, or at least used to, with their mothers in their formative years, their mothers would be instilling Jewish values more easily than the father. Often they have more influence.  This is why they are important.  They also usually have more to say about following a religion in any religious group, Jewish or otherwise.  

 By the time they decided this, all mothers were Jewish in culture and by their DNA which was an unknown quality, but they did know it was by blood.  In fact, keeping genealogy trees had been a very important habit as rabbis tended to marry into other rabbinical families, so there were lots of cross marriages among some very well-known rabbinical families.  

 Resource:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Berg

The Seven Daughters of Eve by Bryan Sykes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews#:~:text=Mt%2DDNA%20of%20Ashkenazi%20Jews,-In%202004%2C%20Behar&text=A%202006%20study%20by%20Behar,European%20and%20Middle%20Eastern%20origin.

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3543  (Richards and 4 women study)

https://www.google.com/search?q=My+Yiddishe+Mama&sxsrf=ALeKk00Chs9W1_5iDlOkUd00hr9B7UXOIQ:1601626678750&tbm=isch&source=iu&ictx=1&fir=Z31QCUc3i4j6yM%252Cpy8XBvjMZ5AudM%252C_&vet=1&usg=AI4_-kR7d99pBONizyFmfbTGe9Z_o1YnTQ&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjviP-pvJXsAhULvZ4KHfrUA2cQ9QF6BAgKECk#imgrc=Z31QCUc3i4j6yM